URWP bickers over support for New Right’s call for recount

Tuesday’s election may have been good for the Israeli right writ large, but it revealed a divided and bickering religious-Zionist community.

On Thursday, the political divides among the religious-Zionist factions burst out into the open in an escalating feud between the two leaders of the Union of Right-Wing Parties over how to relate to the New Right and extremist Otzma Yehudit parties.

The row began when it emerged Thursday morning that the late-counted votes of deployed soldiers may not be enough to put the New Right party, led by the former heads of the religious-Zionist Jewish Home party Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, into the 21st Knesset.

The news, including the fact that New Right may be as close as a few hundred votes away from making it into the Knesset, led Shaked and Bennett to call for a recount of the soldiers’ votes.

Their former party, Jewish Home, is now part of the Union of Right-Wing Parties list, together with the allied National Union party and the extremist Otzma Yehudit, with the three together currently slated to receive four or five seats in the new Knesset.

Jewish Home’s new leader, Rafi Peretz, in a move seen as a bid to punish Bennett and Shaked for abandoning Jewish Home in the run-up to this week’s election, issued a statement late Wednesday backing the Central Elections Committee and pointedly failing to call for a recount.

“In recent hours we’re heard endless rumors about counting soldiers’ votes,” Peretz said. “I have complete faith in [Central Elections Committee chair] Justice Hanan Melcer, and we will wait calmly and responsibly for an official statement from the Elections Committee.”

In response, National Union leader Bezalel Smotrich, who is Peretz’s deputy as No. 2 on the URWP list, openly defied Peretz, saying he backed the demand for a recount and hoped New Right made it into the Knesset.

“We’re going to join in the demand of Shaked and Bennett for a recount of soldiers’ votes,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

“Something here has the very bad smell of an attempt to erase right-wing [parliamentary] seats, and we must not let that happen under any circumstances,” he said.

The disagreement centered on two points: Jewish Home’s possible desire to see New Right evaporate in the hope that the liberal flank of the religious-Zionist community, many of whose members voted New Right, will return to Jewish Home in the next election; and the fact that New Right’s entry into the Knesset would reshuffle the vote percentages for all parties, reducing URWP’s representation from a possible five seats to four.

Later Thursday, amid reports that Jewish Home and National Union officials were denouncing each other’s leaders over the question of helping New Right into the Knesset, Smotrich seemed to double down, arguing New Right was a vital ally in the coming fight over a possible US-proposed peace plan.

“Let’s be clear,” he wrote, “a large right-wing bloc, with four more seats for the ideological right that will stand with us in keeping Netanyahu [from breaking leftward] when the Trump plan comes, is a thousand times more important than stupid revenge, and even more [important] than one more seat for us.”

He added: “I’m angry about what Bennett and Shaked did, but the State of Israel is more important than that! Anyone who says otherwise” — an apparent reference to Peretz — “is just a small, egotistical politician.”

In the end, the fight for the additional URWP seat may not matter much, as the party could drop to four seats in any case once the vote counts from soldiers and diplomats are concluded.